Lake, M. And Reynolds, H.

Lake, M. And Reynolds, H. (2008). Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's

Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.

The book Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Lake & Reynolds, 2008) provides a vivid and depressing account of the degree to which racism and prejudice on the basis of skin color and national origin dominated some of the most important geopolitical events that shaped societies in the American Continent, South Africa, and in the Commonwealth of Australia. While the existence of contemporary racism and prejudice is hardly an unknown concept, what is substantially less known today is the manner in which influential figures in Australian, American, and European history coordinated their ideas and fears of other cultures and races and conspired and colluded to inject their atavism and xenophobia into the national cultures of their respective societies.

The respective leaders of entirely sovereign nations shared the noxious racist literature of the most famous race baiters of the time period, provided one another mutual support, and instead of exerting any positive or humanitarian influence upon one another, they did the exact opposite. In that way, they contributed both individually and in concert to the roughly simultaneous growth of segregationist national policies in North America (particularly in the southern states and in California), and in the Commonwealth of Australia, and they contributed directly to the evolution of Apartheid in South Africa. In that respect, the authors thoroughly document the phenomenon of transnational racism and prejudice that corrects the inaccurate common perception or assumption that racism and prejudice in disparate sovereign nations evolved independently.

For example, by the time Edmund Barton, Australia's first Prime Minister was lobbying against immigration shortly after the turn of the 20th century, he relied substantially on the work of Charles Pearson, who authored National Life and Character:

A Forecast (1893) that had already been embraced by the newly-elected U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Similarly, both leaders were also influenced by the parallel analyses published by the American author James Bryce.

These influences also pervaded the Indian Continent, where restrictions against actually emulating the American institution of outright slavery gave rise to the concept of indentured servitude instead. Compounding the moral depravity, the British Colonialists responded to the competition for labor and the resulting diminution of white wages by resorting to restrictive immigration policies. In this respect, the authors also detail the influence of institutionalized racist policies pioneered in the American South in connection with the thinly veiled race-based restriction on voting rights of the newly-emancipated African-American black former slaves. In particular, the authors explain the influence of American voting eligibility literacy tests in conjunction with "grandfather clauses" that exempted illiterate white voters whose parents and grandparents had voted while excluding emancipated black because virtually no African-Americans (whose ancestors had all been slaves without voting rights) could possibly satisfy those exemptions. In the Commonwealth, these mechanisms manifested themselves in the infamous "dictation tests" within the White Australia Policy.